We have taken a step back to look at the last three years of Aint-Bad Magazine. Much has changed since 2011 when we were undergraduates completing BFA degrees in photography. As we have grown from students to professionals, we have also grown as a company from a small online platform into a bi-annual printed publication that is distributed internationally with the help of photographers and writers from every corner of the globe.

In this issue, the idea of the Archive, and all that it implies for photography as a medium, has influenced us to look back and reflect on the artists whose work we have featured both in print and on the web. We have built this issue featuring the work of 180 artists who share the common trait of being members of the Aint-Bad community. These photographs and texts are bound together to create an archival overview of recent photographic practices.

Photography is our best tool for documentation. Images have the power to influence today and inform tomorrow. It is crucial for the artist to use the archive to look into the past as well as the future. We are so fortunate to be in a position in which we are enveloped by images at all times. As visual communicators, it is essential to spend as much time as we can exploring, discovering, and documenting.

We record history with light. Besides visual data, there is implied information: who we are, where we are from, and what we think, encrypted as visual language. We generate the archive, making records of our existence. And as editors, we are honored to be able to produce printed matter as a time capsule, documenting fragments of time and new formulations of practice. Aint-Bad Magazine hopes to reveal an ever-more urgent, critical conversation about the human condition by way of provocative imagery.